


bring along your tricks and trade

by buries



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Coda, Dark, Deal with a Devil, Episode: s01e07 Breaking the Fourth Wall, Gen, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Manipulation, Missing Scene, Unhappy Ending, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:09:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29603646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buries/pseuds/buries
Summary: When Westview’s perimeter expands, Agatha knows this is the moment she has been waiting hundreds of years for. But her chest feels like it’s piled with stones and she thinks she’s being lowered into a deep lake to test whether she can float.She holds her breath.—Agatha makes a deal with the devil to bring back her one true love. All she has to do is pay him with the right children.[ 1x07 ]
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	bring along your tricks and trade

**Author's Note:**

> The ending of 1x07 BLEW MY MIND. This fic was inspired by a few different things: the first being that damn theme song and music video; the second being my desire to write something super dark (when I originally wanted to write something very light!); and thirdly from me wishing that Agatha would eat the boys like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
> 
> I based this off the idea that Ralph was, indeed, an actual person. This is not a very happy fic because I wanted to write something that was pretty tragic and depressing... so... sorry in advance.
> 
> I have no familiarity with Mephisto outside of what I have learned from reading fan theories and skimming his wiki, so a big fat #yolo.
> 
> Title is from Eisley’s "Many Funerals." This is unbeta’d, so all mistakes are mine.

There was once a witched named Agatha who loved the colour purple. She sewed seeds of purple flowers into the earth and watered it with magic until the little seeds had popped thick roots that embedded themselves into the ground. Her flower bushes bloomed all-year round, weathering the winter and bursting beneath the summer sun.

What this witch didn’t see was the weeds beginning to shoot up from the ground ever so slowly, wrapping themselves around her flower stems and bushes with a knuckle-white grip. Despite their crippling, her flowers survived.

.

Ralph was a handsome man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with freckles all over his nose. Agatha loved that about him. She’d sit and trace her fingers along the constellations of his arms and back for hours and days and nights.

He sighs as he sits in bed, lulled into contentment as her purple magic gently seeps against and into his skin like a soft kiss. She’ll keep him safe, keep the Scarlet Fever from truly settling in his bones. It’s come knocking on their door one too many times in the guise of a friendly neighbour.

"You know, Agatha, the villagers are getting a little suspicious of your flower garden," he says. He sounds tired, too tired. Agatha only presses her fingers in harder, drawing a puppy with a big snout on his bicep. Purple blazes his skin, warming him up from the outside in.

"Envy is a sin, Ralph," she says with a wide smile.

He smiles sadly. "And so’s witchcraft."

.

In hindsight, she should’ve let her flower garden die.

.

Ralph dies before he has the chance to tell her "I told you so."

Not that he ever would. Ralph was a kind man, with broad shoulders and legs that would go for miles. His muscles were lean and his lips thin, but his fingers were always full of purple flowers and purple seedlings.

When Ralph died in their shared bed, she found a fly sitting beside his lifeless head.

.

Agatha refuses to burn at the stake. Instead, she takes hearts in her hands and squeezes them into nothing.

With a round full moon watching her back, she takes a flute between her fingers and lips and rounds up the children, luring them into the nestles of her home. Her garden bursts with colour, leaves and stalks suffocating beneath the outstretched palm of horrible weeds. The porch is overrun with vines, the inside of her home covered in earth and dirt and tendrils of flowers snaking through.

In the dark of night, the villagers bustle around the streets in a flurry of worry and shouts. Agatha stands at the top of the sloped hill and laughs.

"I have all your children," she says with a broomstick in her hand and a pointed black hat in the other. "And they’ll be mine forever."

Agatha lets the survivors believe she had eaten the children. Gifting her a horrifying legacy is the least they could do after everything they have taken from her. Ralph’s ashes remain hidden from her, believed to be an ingredient to a witch’s horrible, terrifying craft rather than a soothing balm for a widow’s broken heart.

No, she needs the children for something much, much worse.

.

Agatha, of course, knows how to get Ralph back.

Not only is she the only witch in Salem to have survived the trials, accusations, slandering and the stake itself, she’s the one who lit the match.

.

Mephisto is not a pretty man. Stockily built with large shoulders and a firmly muscled belly, his hips are too thin and his legs are too long. His eyes are shadowed pools of nothing. His skin is a thick, deep charcoal. He stands within the very heart of the symbol she’s drawn in the ground, upturned earth and the broken flowers of her precious yard crippled beneath his large bare feet.

She doesn’t kneel. Agatha stands tall, hands on her hips, back hot with sweat. Magic bristles in the air, coating the sky purple.

"You are not what I was expecting," she says with a furrow of her brow and a tilt of her head.

He offers her a stiff shrug. She can feel the children quiver in the lower level of her home. 

Perhaps she should feel guilty, but she’s not the monster who ate the children.

.

He promises her a redo.

All she has to do is wait for a Titan to tear the earth in half, rip its insides from its belly, and upturn the natural order Mephisto has had difficulty puncturing with his long claw-like fingers.

"That sounds like a story," she says, brow furrowed in disbelief.

Mephisto smiles, teeth gleaming brilliantly white. It’s like he’s eaten the moon, too. "It sounds like history."

It’ll come in a burst of fiery red, he says, the broken head of a non-man, and speed wrapped in silver.

She just has to wait a few centuries.

.

Agatha waits. And while she waits, she continues to brew her mark on history, build her garden of powerful flowers, and coat the earth in purple.

.

He never tells her the Titan’s colour is purple.

"You know, you could’ve told me we made quite a pair," she tells him as she stands on the side of the street. The neighbourhood is alight with screaming. She watches with amusement as people disappear, chunks of them pulling away as if their skin is layers and layers of pastry. 

As the tearing comes closer, Agatha’s smile is strained. Her neighbours disappear in chunks, floating into the air and disappearing beneath the scorching sun. She paints the amusement onto her lips while her heart pounds in fear in her chest.

She doesn’t doubt that magic will keep her safe. Mephisto has been nothing but true to his word. Power, immortality, a legacy that has birthed numerous stories both written and visual have come because of her.

But she waits for her skin to begin peeling away, licked from her muscles and bones from an invisible fire that burns more hot than the flames of Salem.

.

Agatha survives. Of course.

.

Westview is a pretty picture painted in bright, beaming colours. Appearing in purple smoke along the sidewalk of a house brimming with magic, Agatha conjures a gift with a purple bow wrapping around its very centre.

With a glance around the street, she wiggles her nose and watches as the colour disappears, slipping away until there’s nothing but black and white. She feeds off the magic bleeding from the house before her. It’s hot and warm, powerful in a way that leaves her feeling drunk.

A fly buzzes in her ear. Agatha can’t help but laugh, "Action!"

.

She finds it strange Mephisto is surprised by Wanda birthing two children within a matter of days. 

Wanda is powerful. Her magic tastes different in her mouth. It has a familiar spice to it, but something about its density feels strangely uncommon. Agatha has tutored and destroyed many witches in her days that she finds herself curious to untangle the web of Wanda’s magic. All she does is nudge the world to go awry and watches as Wanda responds.

He appears to her in a cloud of smoke, a little too on the nose in her opinion. Standing by the drain outside of her home, his hands press against his hips. She struggles to make out the features of his face, the dark, soulless eyes that burn brighter than any fire.

"That wasn’t supposed to happen."

She shrugs. "What am I, contraceptive?"

Mephisto bristles. His eyes bore into the Maximoff house. When Agatha peers over her shoulder, she sees a small silhouette, lit by a brilliant nightlight. It flickers off quickly.

.

It’s all a little cliché, if you ask Agatha. Killing the little dog seems to be overkill (pun intended), but she does it anyway. If it’s what Mephisto wants, she will gladly give it to him. If that’s what she needs to do to keep her flowers unseen and unfound, then that’s what she’ll do. She’s killed more for far less.

After all, she had planted these very flowers in her yard centuries ago, hopeful to keep all the pests out.

Leaving little treats along the garden path, Agatha lets Sparky eat kibble from the palm of her hand. She brushes his ears and rubs the back of his neck.

"Sorry, Sparks. But I need to prove a point. You get that, don’t you?"

.

When Mephisto suggests she gift Wanda her brother, Agatha does one better.

She watches from her front seat on Wanda’s lawn, cloaked thickly so not even her own magic can see her. Mephisto sits on the curve of her ear, feet sharp and stabbing against her skin as he insists on buzzing as a fly.

"That wasn’t what we agreed," he says, voice loud in her mind. Agatha suppresses her desire to roll her eyes.

"Where’s the fun in bringing the _real_ thing?"

Pietro crosses the threshold and embraces his sister.

Agatha cackles loudly.

.

Billy and Tommy remind her of the children of Salem. They ask too many questions, grab at her in ways that make her feel like they’re trying to pull her secrets from beneath her skin. Billy looks at her with a tilt of his head too often while Tommy tries to snatch her purse and her cookies from her cookie jar.

"Billy’s doing something super strange," not-Pietro says. He sounds stoned out of his mind, his eyes glassy. A part of him is coming back to himself. Peter, not Pietro. A doppelgänger shaped differently from the man he should be today. Sometimes, Agatha thinks she should’ve brought the real thing back. He’d have required less energy after she repaired his broken skin and breathed life back into his dead, decayed chest.

But there’d be no fun, no plot twist, no heart stopping cliffhanger if she had given into the demands of the fans.

He looks at her over the back fence and glances over his shoulder as if suspecting to be watched. No one is home. "He, like, talks to nothing."

Agatha furrows her brow. "What does he say?"

Not-Pietro shrugs. "Stuff. His mom’s acting weird. Halloween gibberish. Nothing I’d be worrying about."

"Keep an eye on him," she says. "Take them trick-or-treating. And try and be convincing."

Billy being perceptive was never a part of Mephisto’s script.

.

She doesn’t care about Wanda.

On the morning of Halloween, Agatha scurries over towards Wanda’s house and knocks gleefully on the door. "Let’s go for a walk before the ghosts and monsters come out!"

Taking Wanda gently by the arm as they walk around the street, she tugs her closer and presses gently into her ear, "You know, you should be more careful with those boys. They could get into all sorts of trouble on Halloween. You shouldn’t leave them with strangers."

Wanda’s brow furrows. "Are you hinting at my brother?"

Agatha ensures to furrow her brows exaggeratedly. "That’s your brother? You hardly look alike!"

Wanda’s frown only deepens. Agatha can see the worms wiggling in her head, burrowing deep beneath the earth, seeking the roots of Agatha’s distrust.

She doesn’t care about Wanda.

.

When Westview’s perimeter expands, Agatha knows this is the moment she has been waiting hundreds of years for. But her chest feels like it’s piled with stones and she thinks she’s being lowered into a deep lake to test whether she can float.

She holds her breath.

.

When Agatha finally gets the boys alone, she hides cookies in the oven. All she needs is Tommy to go hunting for them and Billy will follow.

"I like it here," Billy says, leaning his head against her arm. She sits on the couch, sandwiched between the two of them. Neither of them feel like true children. Billy is too soft and gentle, and Tommy is too vibrant and loud. "It’s quiet here."

"Oh," Agatha laughs. "I can put the radio on."

"No," Billy says, brows furrowing. He searches for his words quietly. "I mean… It’s quiet. No voices."

Agatha swallows thickly, hoping he doesn’t hear it. She keeps her mind purposefully blank.

.

She shoves them into the oven. It seems like the thing to do.

.

Next order of business: She destroys Vision’s head.

It’s easy to do. Planting the seeds of his children’s silhouettes, he chases them as they gleefully run towards Ellis Avenue. His shouts are terrifyingly loud, but Agnes blocks him out, lowering his microphone so his screams become mere buzzing in her ears.

She shoves him outside of the border of Westview and barricades the door as thickly as she can. She watches as his silhouette begins to fall apart in agony on the other side.

She only feels regretful when Wanda discovers his discarded bits and howls all night.

.

Agatha tells herself that she doesn’t care what happens to Billy and Tommy when Mephisto comes to collect them. She stands at the entrance of her kitchen, leaning against the archway. Her arms are crossed against her chest as she ignores every impulse within her to go and fetch them from his arms.

Tommy struggles against him. Billy merely looks at her, pinning her in place like his gaze is tight rope trapping her against a splintering, fiery stake. His gaze burns her. 

.

The next full moon, Mephisto stands by the drain outside of the Maximoff house. The sky above him blackens into nothing.

Agatha ventures past the boundary of her property, arms swinging by her sides. Her heels are noisy like flashes of thunder. "You know, she’s going to come for you."

Mephisto merely shrugs. His mouth doesn’t open, but she hears his voice boom in her mind. _Our deal._

When Agatha stops in front of him, she peers around his thick shoulder and sees him. A familiar silhouette, centuries old, stands off to the side and tucked in the shadows.

Her heart thumps. "Ralph!"

.

She should’ve known there’d be a catch. Ralph is a soulless body not even her magic can enter. When he opens his mouth, purple blossoms spill from his tongue, petals wilted and stalks blackened.

Agatha tries to reverse it, tries to pull from the magic Wanda bleeds in her grief for her boys. 

Again, she fails to save Ralph. 

.

Turns out, she can drown.

.

Playing her flute in the hopes of luring her fellow witch out, she watches as the Maximoff house is cloaked in darkness. Hugged tight within shadows, it disappears as hell enters it.

She fails to save Wanda, too.

.

When it’s all said and done, she really did like Wanda.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at [Tumblr.](https://finnicks.tumblr.com)


End file.
